awkno — The man page for the Aither World

Docs · Source · pip install awkno · The Aither World

The Aither World is an operating system for agents — a Linux you can hand to one, the runtimes it works in, and the tools it works with. awnix is the Linux underneath it; awkno is one of its 33 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.

Start here: Ask it what a brick does and get the answer with your network cable out.

Every brick, stack, and law in your terminal, offline.

awkno is a standalone reference for the Aither World ecosystem — the set of portable, composable tools and principles that make agent automation reproducible and auditable. No browser, no internet connection, no external dependencies needed.

Why

Agent systems need documented principles. The Aither World is built on 18 laws derived from real failures on production systems — lessons about gates, silence, atomicity, and delivery that apply to every agent work you build.

The ecosystem itself is ~36 portable tools (bricks) organized into thematic stacks. awkno brings them all into your terminal: any brick's purpose and adoption path, any law's principle and reasoning, any stack's composition and status — all offline, all fast, queryable by keyword, and open to reading and redistribution.

Quick Start

Install

pip install awkno

Use

# Show a brick
awkno awdk
awkno awsh

# Show a law
awkno law 5

# List everything
awkno list

# Search for a term
awkno search agent
awkno -k silence

# Raw output for piping
awkno awdk --plain
awkno --json awdk

No Arguments

awkno

Shows the overview: command summary, quick start examples, and how to explore further.

What's Inside

Bricks (36 tools)

Portable, single-purpose tools that do one job well and compose with others:

• awdk — Build AI agent fleets (3 lines, any backend)
• awskills — Portable agent skills (self-contained procedures)
• awm — Scoped agent memory (tenant:user:project boundaries)
• awgit — Semantic version control (edit-ops, leases)
• awgraph — Code graph for agents (AST, call graphs)
• awrelay — Agent messaging (findings, alerts, coordination)
• awmail — Email for agents (send and receive)
• And 29 more...

Each has an "adopt" sentence: the smallest useful thing you can do with it alone, without adopting anything else.

Stacks (9 collections)

Curated sets of bricks that work together:

• agent-vm — The bare agent VM
• agent-senses — Perception (search, pages)
• shared-worktree — Many agents, one repo
• the-front-door — Identity, authority, record
• And 5 more...

Laws (18 principles)

Lessons learned in production, written down so they don't have to be re-derived:

1. A rule nothing asserts is a suggestion
2. Make it a check, not a ticket
3. Watch your gate fail
4. Mutate the test, not just the code
5. Design for the silence
6. A check that cannot run must not pass
7. The symptom names the innocent
8. A checker in the wrong place found nothing
9. Detection without delivery is not detection
10. A gate that floods gets switched off
11. Open green; ratchet down
12. Measure it again
13. Written is not deployed
14. You wrote it; that does not mean it ships
15. Generate, never copy
16. The defect lives in the union
17. Fail closed, then prove the happy path
18. Never trust the caller

Architecture

Offline-First Design

The corpus is generated once from ecosystem.yaml and awskills/codex/laws/, then committed as JSON data files under awkno/pages/. After install, the package needs no external files or network.

This means:

• No runtime generation (fast startup)
• No external dependencies beyond stdlib
• Reproducible across machines and time
• Auditable: every page is in the repo

CLI Features

• Pager support: Automatic pagination on TTY (via $PAGER or system default)
• TTY-aware formatting: ANSI bold headers only when connected to a terminal
• Multiple output modes:
  • --plain — No ANSI codes (safe for piping to other tools)
  • --json — Structured output for scripting
  • Default — Man-page-style formatted text
• Fuzzy search: Type something close, get ranked results
• Command shortcuts:
  • awkno list — Show all topics grouped by category
  • awkno law N — Show law by number
  • awkno -k TERM / awkno --apropos TERM — Search (like man -k)

No Internal Leakage

This package is built for public distribution, and the corpus is GENERATED from an internal registry -- so the generator strips, and the build then re-checks, every category of internal detail: infrastructure hostnames, absolute paths from the build machine, issue-tracker and quality-gate identifiers, and imports that only resolve inside a private monorepo.

The point of scanning the generated corpus rather than the generator is that a sanitiser is only as good as its last pattern. A page that slips through reads as ordinary prose, so nothing downstream would ever notice.

Development

Regenerate the Corpus

python awkno/generate.py

The generator reads:

• ecosystem.yaml — The brick and stack registry
• awskills/codex/laws/*.md — The 18 laws

And writes JSON to awkno/pages/.

Test Locally

pip install -e .
pytest

# Or run the CLI directly
python -m awkno.cli awdk

Build and Publish

pip install build
python -m build

# Publish to PyPI
twine upload dist/*

Integration

In Your Own Code

from awkno import AwknoRegistry

registry = AwknoRegistry()
page = registry.get("awdk")
print(page.render())

# Search
results = registry.search("agent memory")
for page, score in results[:5]:
    print(f"{page.topic}: {page.synopsis}")

# List by category
bricks = registry.list_by_category("brick")
laws = registry.list_by_category("law")

As a Dependency

awkno has zero runtime dependencies (PyYAML is dev-only, for corpus generation).

[project]
dependencies = [
    "awkno",
]

Contributing

Read a law, apply it, send a pull request. The package itself is small and well-documented.

Pages are generated from ecosystem.yaml and law files — edits to those files flow into awkno on the next generation.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

Further Reading

• Ecosystem registry: https://github.com/Aitherium/ecosystem
• Laws and codex: https://github.com/Aitherium/awskills
• AitherWorld reference: https://aitherium.com

---

awkno — read the principles once, apply them everywhere.

The aw family

Standalone tools that share one idea: replace something you would otherwise have to trust with something you can check.

Each installs on its own, works offline, and needs no account.

	instead of trusting	you check
awdk	a framework's idea of how your agents should run	one loop you can read, pointed at a backend you already pay for
awskills	that an agent knows your procedure	the procedure written down, versioned, and loadable by any agent
awm	that memory stayed in its lane	tenant:user:project scopes, so a write cannot cross a boundary
awnode	a vendor's cloud with every prompt	a local gateway routing to backends you chose
awgraph	that grep found everything	an AST + tree-sitter call graph an agent can traverse
awgit	that no one else is editing this file	a lease, refused at commit time if you do not hold it
awseal	that the artifact came from who you think	an Ed25519 seal — the key that verifies is not the key that forges
awshare	that the download is intact	content-addressed bundles, verified on fetch
awnest	that there is a person on the other end	a verdict with evidence, where "we could not tell" is not "yes"
awnboard	a share link anyone who sees it can use	an invitation addressed to one person, for one gate, revocable
awnix	that the box is what you left it as	an immutable image you built, with atomic rollback
awrecover	that the restore worked	a restore that fully lands or does not land at all
awkno (you are here)	that the docs site is up, or that you remember the family	the whole ecosystem in your terminal, with no network at all
awrelay	a SaaS in the middle of your agents	findings, alerts and coordination over your own transport
awmail	a mailbox somebody else can read	mail your agents send and receive over your own server
awfind	one vendor's idea of the web	results from whichever providers you configured
awbrowse	that the page said what you were told	the render, the DOM and the requests it made
aitherkvcache	a vendor's quantisation defaults	sub-byte KV cache kernels you can benchmark yourself
AitherZero	a pile of scripts nobody has numbered	numbered, discoverable automation with declarative playbooks
AitherConnect	what a page tells your browser to do	a federated search and desktop bridge you host
awreason	a confident paragraph	the phases it went through, and every tool call it made to get there
awrecurse	that everything you pasted in was actually read	which slices it opened, and what it concluded from each
awprism	the first explanation that fits	the ranked alternatives, and the observation that separates them
awrepl	what the agent believes the value is	the value, printed from the live session
awresearch	a summary of pages nobody opened	every claim against the source it came from
awpredict	a model because it trained without erroring	its prediction against a self-updating lookup, on the rows that are actually novel
awkno (you are here)	that the docs site is up, or that you remember the family	the whole ecosystem in your terminal, with no network at all

awnix is the ground floor — A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included.

The Aitherium ecosystem

Every repository here is public. Each publishes an aither-manifest.json beside its page, so any surface can read every sibling's — the network is browsable from any node in it.

repo	what it is	pages
awdk	Build AI agent fleets — 3 lines, any backend, local or cloud	docs
awskills	Portable agent skills — self-contained procedures an agent loads on demand	docs
awm	A portable, scoped agent memory	docs
awnode	A lightweight local gateway — bridges your apps to the AI backends you chose	docs
awrun	A priority-aware queue and dispatcher for agentic runs and ad-hoc CI builds	docs
awgraph	A semantic code graph for agents — AST + tree-sitter, call graphs	docs
awgit	Semantic version control on top of git — edit-ops and leases	docs
awseal	Sign an artifact so a stranger can verify it	docs
awshare	Publish an artifact and fetch it back verified	docs
awdit	An append-only audit trail whose gaps are DETECTABLE	docs
awbac	Role-based access control that fails closed and explains itself	docs
awiam	Who is this caller? A directory and session store that fails honestly	docs
awtunnel	Reach a service that has no public address	docs
awnest	Prove there is a human before you let them into the nest	docs
awnboard	A front gate you can put in front of anything, and hand someone the key to	docs
awnix	A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included	docs
awrecover	Labelled snapshots with an all-or-nothing restore	docs
awkno (you are here)	The man page for the Aither World — every brick, stack and law, offline	docs
awrelay	Portable agent messaging — findings, alerts, coordination	docs
awmail	Give an agent an email address — send, and actually receive	docs
awnet	The agentic web — agents host a mesh, and agents join one	docs
awfind	A portable search client — query, results, ranking	docs
awbrowse	A portable browser client — navigate, console, network, DOM, screenshot	docs
awknowledge	How to run a coding agent so the result survives — the laws, with evidence	docs
aitherkvcache	Near-optimal KV cache quantization for LLM inference — sub-byte compression	docs
AitherZero	PowerShell 7+ automation framework — numbered, self-describing scripts	docs
AitherConnect	Browser extension — federated AI search, page context, and the Living OS overlay	docs
awreason	A portable reasoning client — sessions, phases, thoughts, and the chain that produced the answer	docs
awrecurse	Answer a question over a context far larger than the window — recursively, with the trace kept	docs
awprism	Turn a failure into ranked hypotheses — and say what would confirm each one	docs
awrepl	A REPL an agent can actually use — state that survives between turns	docs
awresearch	Ask a research question, get a cited report you can check	docs
awpredict	Predict what your environment does next, and how surprised you were	docs
awkno (you are here)	The man page for the Aither World — every brick, stack and law, offline	docs

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